Lewis Mumford Quotes

Technology is not destiny.

Technology determines the possibilities of society. It doesn't matter whether you start out from a fascist state or a communist state or a free-market state.

If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.

Patents should be for technological innovations. So a program for a new machine tool should be patentable but a non-technological innovation, such as grammar-checking software for a word-processor, should not be.

Luddism is no longer with us, but today we seem to be overtaken by its opposite, the inevitability of technological change coupled with the blind belief in capitalism's ability to provide us with all we need.

What can be done, will be done. Like a natural force technology is impossible to hold back.

A fundamental rule in technology says that whatever can be done will be done.

David Brin is a technological determinist. He thinks that we understand the trend and we need to hop on it. I don't have any such illusions.

Technology will always win. You can delay technology by legal interference, but technology will flow around legal barriers.

Technology is the only means through which you touch on new things.

Futurologists have been multiplying like flies since the day Herman Kahn made Cassandra's profession "scientific," yet somehow not one of them has come out with the clear statement that we have wholly abandoned ourselves to the mercy of technological progress. The roles are now reversed: humanity becomes, for technology, a means, an instrument for achieving a goal unknown and unknowable.

The real accomplishment of modern science and technology consists in taking ordinary men, informing them narrowly and deeply and then, through appropriate organization, arranging to have their knowledge combined with that of other specialized but equally ordinary men. This dispenses with the need for genius. The resulting performance, though less inspiring, is far more predictable.

We are using new technologies in meaningful ways. To build our new refinery in 60 percent of the time it took to build our first, we are training 20,000 people in a new generation of welding technology in six months.

People in the future look back on primitive machinery or technology or painting, and in some ways, it always seems amazingly intricate and finely wrought.

The World's Fair audience tended to think of the machine as unqualifiedly good, strong, stupid and obedient. They thought of it as a giant slave, an untiring steel Negro, controlled by Reason in a world of infinite resources.

It is a truism that the structure of a society is basically determined by its technology. Not in an absolute sense-there may be totally different cultures using identical tools-but the tools settle the possibilities; you can't have interstellar trade without spaceships. A race limited to a single planet, possessing a high knowledge of mechanics but with its basic machines of industry and war requiring a large capital investment, will inevitably tend toward collectivism under one name or another. Free enterprise needs elbow room.

It's easy to kind of say it's the elite that's putting you down. Well, it wasn't really the elite, technology will do that.

I'm not a big believer in revolutions. What people call revolutions in technology were more of a shift in perception - from big machines to PC's (the technology just evolved, fairly slowly at that), and from PC's to the internet. The next "revolution" is going to be the same thing - not about the technology itself being revolutionary, but a shift in how you look at it and how you use it.

We cannot say that everything developed in capitalist countries is of a capitalist nature. For instance, technology, science - even advanced production management is also a sort of science - will be useful in any society or country.

Nothing grows old-fashioned so fast as modernity.

Technology is an important element in progress. See, we can always do something better. We can improve water technology, or energy efficiency. There is always progress forward using technology and that's where innovation starts.

Young people - with their dynamism, their energy and their inherent understanding of our interconnected world - have much to teach us. Increased educational attainment, advances in technology and the spread of information have made this generation the best educated, most connected and most informed in history

Apart from the seemingly magical Internet, life in broad material terms isn't so different from what it was in 1953... The wonders portrayed in 'The Jetsons,' the space-age television cartoon from the 1960s, have not come to pass... Life is better and we have more stuff, but the pace of change has slowed down.

There are many machines throughout history that were built to do something better than a human can.

Our expectations for a technology rise with its advancement.